New Albums From Neil Young, Toby Keith and David Virelles

In Neil Young’s new memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace” (Blue Rider Press), he describes his band Crazy Horse as a “window to the cosmic world” where “songs graze like buffalo. The herd is still there, and the plains are endless.” In another chapter he adds, “Any ride on the Horse must not have a destination.”

And it’s clear from the get-go — a nearly 28-minute song called “Driftin’ Back” — that Mr. Young and Crazy Horse will take all the time they want on their new album, “Psychedelic Pill.”

Crazy Horse — Ralph Molina on drums, Billy Talbot on bass and, since 1975, Frank (Poncho) Sampedro on rhythm guitar — is Mr. Young’s unvarnished, elemental, intuitive electric jam band, one that can lumber its way toward greatness. Its bristling remakes of folk songs on “Americana,” released this year, were a warm-up for “Psychedelic Pill,” the first full album of new songs Mr. Young has recorded with it since 1996.

In nine tracks spread over 88 minutes on two CDs, they resume their collaboration like some mythical leviathan resurfacing from the deep: colossal, persistent, self-guided and oblivious to constraints on lesser creatures. Like Bob Dylan’s “Tempest” (which has a marathon song of its own), “Psychedelic Pill” doesn’t try to ingratiate itself with new fans. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and one worth taking.

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Neil Young performing songs from the new album “Psychedelic Pill” last month at the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park.Credit
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

What was on Mr. Young’s mind as he wrote his memoir is also in the songs: personal memories, mortality, friendship, love, metaphysics and the mediocre sound of mp3s. The album was recorded analog, onto eight-track tape through the vintage tube mixing console, the “Green Board,” that Mr. Young also used for “Harvest,” and live performance is the core of the music. It’s easy to envision Crazy Horse alongside Mr. Young as he traces keening, melodic leads toward scrabbling peaks or plunging low jabs, thumping and strumming while watching him for a cue to get back to the verses.

Many of the lyrics fall short of the narrative sweep and surreal revelations of Mr. Young’s past Crazy Horse masterworks like “Powderfinger” or “Like a Hurricane.” There are bits of autobiography in “Born in Ontario” and “Twisted Road,” and an audio flashback in “Driftin’ Back”: the song begins with luminous acoustic guitars, then segues (while “driftin’ back”) to a fuzz-toned sound suggesting Mr. Young’s 1960s band Buffalo Springfield. Two shorter songs recall Mr. Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” as they gaze with wistful admiration at girls lost in their dance: “Psychedelic Pill” (which is included in two differently distorted mixes) and “She’s Always Dancing.”

Three songs reach deeper. “For the Love of Man” is set to a comforting ballad melody, only to ponder fate while wishing for angels to “hear the voice that calls to them.” Over nearly 17 minutes “Ramada Inn” portrays a couple held together by longtime love but strained by a drinking problem. And in “Walk Like a Giant” — which includes a cheerfully whistled hook, vocal-harmony choruses and a four-minute noise coda — Mr. Young mourns and rages over what happened to his generation’s youthful ideals:

“It fell apart and it breaks my heart/To think about how close we came.”

Yet the power of the music resides not only in the songwriting — “brand-new tune with familiar chords,” Mr. Young sings in “Twisted Road” — but also in the hand-hewed sound and weathered companionability of Mr. Young and Crazy Horse. They don’t hurry, but their wanderings still get somewhere.

TOBY KEITH

“Hope on the Rocks”

(Show Dog/Universal)

Last year Toby Keith literally stumbled his way back into pop culture relevance with “Red Solo Cup,” an ode to the drinking vessel of choice for soused common folk everywhere. He begins the song almost rapping — at least he’s talking, and mumbling, and not quite hitting all the words, in imitation of someone who’s found his way to the bottom of his cup. In the video Mr. Keith wandered around what looked like frat party, a few degrees off vertical.

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“Red Solo Cup” wasn’t as lovable as the inebriation anthems of Mr. Keith’s early years, but it had charm, and also some stylistic quirk. He turned 50 last year, and even though “Red Solo Cup” was suited for someone half his age, he was convincing, proving himself to be a singer of still untapped tricks.

That was then, and “Hope on the Rocks” is now, and whatever left turn Mr. Keith took has been ruthlessly course-corrected on this album, which is dutiful and workmanlike and totally bereft of passion, so rote it could possibly have been written and recorded over a long weekend. (Most of the album is written by Mr. Keith with familiar partners like Rivers Rutherford and Bobby Pinson.) Four songs out of 10 refer to alcohol in the title, and in each case drinking is a means of forgetting but not regret.

“I Like Girls That Drink Beer” covers the usual country-boy-rejects-rich-girl territory, and “Get Got” is just a string of empty aphorisms — “You always catch more bees with honey/Less is more ’cept love and money” — better suited for a Mr. Keith-endorsed Hallmark line. He doesn’t even muster the energy for a new burst of jingoism against an impending liberal menace; maybe the alcohol made him forget.

“Hope on the Rocks” is Mr. Keith’s 16th studio album, making him maybe the genre’s most reliable elder, now that George Strait is riding off into the sunset, Garth Brooks is more often seen in Las Vegas, and Alan Jackson is exploring his spiritual side. Mr. Keith churns out albums at a pace of roughly one a year, which is a recipe for occasional principle-free duds.

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He’s not aging gracefully, which in and of itself is no real offense, but he may be regressing, which is unfortunate, because over time he’s proved himself to be far more versatile than his peers. In recent years his voice has taken on rich and lustrous soul dimensions, which flash briefly on “Missed You Just Right,” also the only song with an unexpected narrative twist. Mr. Keith tells someone who broke his heart, “I was surprised with your goodbye but now I’m grateful that you’re gone/I found the one that makes the mistakes I’ve made make perfect sense.”

He sounds proud and also vulnerable, no red Solo cup in sight. JON CARAMANICA

David Virelles, a 28-year-old pianist originally from Cuba, has been part of New York’s higher-level jazz scene for four years, playing with Steve Coleman, Ravi Coltrane, Mark Turner and others. Last year he built his own band, Continuum.

And Continuum’s broad, mysterious first album attempts the wide-angle purview you might expect of a young Cuban intellectual, entwining threads of Africa, Europe, the Antilles and America; it sounds obsessed with tradition and newness and how they bleed into each other. All that is advanced enough. But doing it in a way that isn’t glib, that backs research with lots of intuition and risk, seems very special.

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Mr. Virelles has made one album under his own name before: “Motion,” in 2008. It was a post-music-school album, and a good one, if more conventionally of its time. It made its case better than hundreds of others, and sounded pretty much like a new jazz record, especially one with a few Cuban musicians in its lineup: polished and rhythmically complex. “Continuum,” by contrast, is not a conventional jazz record and maybe not even of its time, though not particularly of any previous time, either.

Its music is inspired, on the surface, in rhythm and words, by Afro-Cuban religious culture, and on the lower frequencies by some of Mr. Virelles’s heroes of American music, particularly Henry Threadgill, Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor.

His band includes two tiers of elders in the New York jazz scene, the 47-year old bassist Ben Street and the 72-year old drummer Andrew Cyrille. It also includes Román Díaz, the Cuban poet and percussionist, who performs ritual Afro-Cuban chanting and plays a battery of percussion, including the four-drum grouping particular to the secret-society Abakuá tradition called biankomeko; and the Cuban painter Alberto Lescay, who painted the abstract cover art. (How about that as an idea, or a gesture? A member of the group who doesn’t play an instrument?)

Mr. Virelles’s keyboard touch can be disarmingly precise. You hear it in quiet passages, through the beautiful, slow, free-rhythm ballad “Threefold”; and in flowing ones, like his improvisation over the drum clicks in “A Celebration, Circa 1836”; and in insistent ones, like “The Executioner,” in which he adopts some of Cecil Taylor’s restless attack. But there’s more to his language than that. A lot of it lies in his composing, and that composing is often not quite in the jazz tradition, even the experimental jazz tradition.

In “Mañongo Pabio” you hear his computer-generated arpeggios rippling over a nonresolving series of long chords on the Wurlitzer organ. That’s played over a fast, sharp, dancing solo by Mr. Cyrille, a three-and-a-half-minute improvisation that perfectly communicates who he is: a jazz drummer who learned his art 50 years ago, right when free jazz was atomizing swing rhythm. What a great, mysterious track. This album doesn’t just connect cultures and styles, it also connects generations, without schematically making a point that it’s doing so.

“Our Birthright” is this album’s centerpiece and its longest track. It includes Mr. Díaz’s poetic chanting and begins with dark, curious piano chords, first carefully and then impulsively placed, as the track builds up into a free-jazz tangle with the appearance of three horn players. They are Román Filiú and Mark Turner on saxophones, and Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, none of them playing particularly in their own recognizable style.

It’s the most traditional sound on this album, a section of cultivated wildness that sounds almost predictable, given the amount of ground this recording covers otherwise. BEN RATLIFF

A version of this review appears in print on October 30, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: He’s Still Searching His Heart. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe